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From the Contents of Esoteric Classes

Esoteric Lessons Part III: Berlin, 4-11-'13

EL,
Berlin, 4-11-'13

One often
finds that beginning esoterics say that they're disturbed by
all kinds of thoughts that press in. But that shouldn't surprise us,
for thoughts are the only spiritual things on the physical plane, and
they assert themselves whenever we get into a spiritual
activity like meditation. One shouldn't want to fight against these
thoughts much, there's no point to that; let the thoughts do what
they want. Here one has to continue, persevere, activate one's will,
to always return to the meditation's content. This will is much
more important than how one does the meditation. If one repeatedly
returns to the content of the meditation one pushes the thoughts back
and thereby creates a kind of a sphere around one in which there's no
disturbing thoughts, and it's this sphere that's the most suitable
for having super-sensible experiences. Another experience of an
esoteric is that he begins to notice certain qualities in
himself that he had missed before. Here again it's not a matter of
combating these qualities — the only thing that one has
to do is to strongly continue the given exercises. They're the ones
that drove these qualities far enough out for us to notice, and
they'll disappear by themselves as the exercises are continued.
Now through one's continued exercises one may have gotten so far that
one has this or that experience, for instance one sees
Imaginations. Then beginners often ask whether what they saw
was imaginary or whether it was a reality in the spiritual realm. One
can ask this question if one judges in accordance with events on the
physical plane — which can hardly be any different at the
beginning of an esoteric path. But this question is only
meaningful on the physical plane — it's not the important thing
in the spiritual world at all.

For
instance, let's say that a meditator or someone else has seen
his doppelganger. For instance he may have planned to go to a party
where they intended to poison him. But he enters a
semi-darkened room and sees himself. On the basis of this
experience he doesn't go to the party, so he doesn't get
poisoned. Now the form in which the experience is clothed isn't the
main thing. The most important thing is that the spiritual being who
accompanies a man from one incarnation to the next wanted to make an
impression on him. There is such a being who belongs to the angel
hierarchy and who's called a man's guardian angel in religious
confessions. To impress the man this being can't
influence his thoughts in such a way that the man would have
known: You shouldn't go to the party tonight.

This
can't be the case, because all of our thoughts except those that are
created through spiritual science belong to the physical plane and
therefore can't be influenced from super-sensible realms.

With the
exception of the spiritual-scientific ones mentioned we must
lay our thoughts aside during sleep and after death. But our feelings
and will impulses already reach into the super-sensible realm by
themselves and therefore an impression can be made on them.
This happens in the seeing of the doppelganger, for instance. But it
could also be that someone sees his doppelganger not because the
angelic being shows it to him, but because his etheric body
became free even if only for a moment and that's why he sees his
physical body before him. And it's also possible that one sees
one's doppelganger simply because one has ruined one's stomach and
therefore the etheric body — maybe only the parts that take
care of the stomach — has become free momentarily. All these
things must be carefully distinguished from each other.

And it can
also be that the same impression that must be made — as in the
poisoning case — is made in other ways. One man can see his
doppelganger, while another enters a room as a painting falls from
the wall with a loud and physically unexplainable crash. This
approximately corresponds to one communication being written in
English letters and another one in Latin ones. And so it doesn't make
any sense to ask: Is what I saw real or not? An esoteric teacher will
never explain an Imagination that one has only had once, but
only if it occurs often or is important for other reasons. It's
as if someone wrote BIN on the blackboard, and someone would
say: I see a straight line, then two little arches, an upright
line again and then three connected lines. Whereas someone else
who has learned to read immediately says: that's bin. But there's no
obvious reading of Imaginations — one first has to learn how to
read them.

Or it
may be that at the beginning of one's esoteric path one sees figures
like this in the air:

Then he
might go to an eye doctor and he would tell him that this is an eye
disease. And from his standpoint the doctor is right — for him
the whole belief in theosophy is a disease. But this just comes because
the etheric body begins to make new movements and to momentarily
transfer them to the physical body; that's why he sees the things.
Some esoterics can now say: But then my physical body is harmed by
the exercises if the etheric body works on it like that — and
then they get a terrible fear of every little pain and trouble. But
there's no danger from these things; the etheric body will
eliminate these results by itself after awhile. There's only one
remedy for this, and that's to persevere calmly. Occasionally
someone comes and says: I have a terrible headache at the root
of my nose; what should I do for it? — The best thing would be
to do nothing for it, but to continue calmly with the meditations.
Then the pains will get worse at first, and one will get a feeling as
if one's head would split, but firstly it won't split, and secondly
the pain will make it possible to break through the wall that
separates us from the super-sensible. We can only develop
further via pain and suffering. Then too the diseases that arise
there are often the result of certain developmental conditions that
one went through in a past life and that a soul in this life can't
get rid of except through disease and suffering. When such a disease
is over one will often be aware that one has gotten further in one's
development. One should feel that everything that comes there is
karma.